


Write Me Back into the World

by MuseofWriting



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Other characters mentioned/appear briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 18:20:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15055013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuseofWriting/pseuds/MuseofWriting
Summary: They were judicious about who they invited to Wally’s funeral.





	Write Me Back into the World

**Author's Note:**

> Have some sweet sweet angst before S3 arrives

            They were judicious about who they invited to Wally’s funeral.

            There were other memorials. The Justice League made a public announcement about Kid Flash’s heroism that led to two public candlelight vigils, one in Central City and one at the Hall of Justice. The heroes made a show of turning out for that one, although no one in the public was sure if they would until the last minute. Doctor Fate quietly patrolled the perimeter, keeping away any potential villains looking to take advantage of the gathering of heroes, for the sake of a boy who’d once thrown natural skepticism to the wind to restore order.

            Wallace West officially died in a freak accident. Fell down the stairs, broke his neck. Tragic. Shocking. Normal. Even in death, unmasking wasn’t safe. It became too easy to connect the dots from one secret identity to another. With his parents’ blessing, his college held a memorial service for him. Dick got invited by some civilian friend he’d met a couple times, who had friended him on Facebook. He watched the date creep closer and closer with a paralyzed kind of guilt until it slipped past him.

            But for the funeral, they were careful. No one allowed in unless they knew who Wally was in and out of the mask. Those who had known both sides of him needed that time. They needed the space to grieve and celebrate all of him, without secrets.

            A few masks dotted the crowd – Tim, for one. No sunglasses, he’d said. The mask felt more respectful. Clark arrived with glasses and hunched shoulders. Bruce came as Batman, slipping in from the shadows, not wanting to drag the paparazzi along behind him. But most of the Team knew each other, face and name and mask. There weren’t many secrets between them these days.

            Dick did not wear a mask. He did not wear sunglasses. He did not come as Nightwing, or Robin. He ignored Bruce’s glare and Tim’s wide-eyed shock and walked bare-faced into the hall, consequences be damned. He would not say goodbye to his friend from behind a wall of secrets and aliases.

            A lot of curious stares came his way, and double-takes from those who already knew – Kaldur, Artemis, Barbara. He wondered idly how many people would even recognize him. Especially the newer members of the team and most of the Justice League had barely if ever seen him out of costume, let alone in a suit. He caught Jaime squinting a moment before his jaw dropped – probably the beetle told him who Dick was. Bart’s eyes held on his face, staring blankly for a moment. Bart had known his name. Dick wondered if he’d also known his face all along, or if the Dick Grayson of his timeline had died long before Bart was even born. Garfield’s face scrunched in confusion, as did La’gaan’s. Superboy met his eyes, and Dick saw recognition, clear and quiet. _So this is you_.

            After the service, the Team found themselves in a corner while members of the Justice League milled about. M’gann opened up their mindlink, but no one spoke. They simply sat in the quiet of each other’s breathing, beating hearts and background static of internal thoughts a constant wash of white noise. It was a concerted effort at calm, but Dick felt it seep into him nonetheless, tension in his neck and shoulders coming undone.

            People trickled out in twos and threes. Jaime and Bart. Karen and Mal. Tim, Barbara, and Cassandra. M’gann and Garfield. Eventually, he was left with only Artemis and Kaldur. Still, none of them spoke, just reached out and took each other’s hands and held on tight, still-beating pulses pressed against each other’s fingers like a promise. They stayed there until sunset, as the room drifted slowly into darkness.

———

            A few months later, he was in Bludhaven. He needed space, time, room to breathe and grieve and step away. He’d gone to visit Haly, first. He’d done a few shows for nostalgia’s sake, and because sweating and moving and working was always better than stewing in his pain. but he couldn’t have given up Nightwing cold turkey, even if he’d wanted to, not after so long living and breathing the role all but 24/7. So now he was in Bludhaven, trying to keep Nightwing’s activities as minimal as possible. He didn’t spend days and nights tracking drug rings and supervillains without pause. He went to bed at 2AM instead of 4 or 5, and never worked more than five nights a week. He was awake and about during the day. He tried to build a life, a normal, daytime life, outside a mask.

            He had a job now. He was teaching little kids tumbling tricks at a local gym. Basic gymnastics, safe and fun ways for them roll and learn better balance. The contrast to his usual lifestyle was so absurd it was a struggle not to dissolve into a kind of hysterical laughter every time he thought too hard about it. He didn’t recognize these children, who wailed over skinned knees and jammed fingers like the world was ending. He didn’t recognize the eyes bright and naïve and untroubled by any kind of trauma beyond their years. He didn’t recognize the blind faith that they had that Mommy or Daddy could always fix everything. They were sweet kids. They were not the kinds of kids he was used to dealing with. It was not, perhaps, his first choice for a job, and he hadn’t relished relying on the nepotism of Haly’s recommendation and being Bruce Wayne’s ward to get it, but he hadn’t exactly had a lot of choice in the matter. A modestly impressive academic record at Gotham Academy was marred by being a senior year dropout, and the only two things on his resume besides that were “circus boy” and “unsanctioned vigilante.”

            He’d had some passing thoughts towards college, as he’d hit his senior year. He figured online courses, something with flexible schedules, he could make it work. He’d had applications in the works – until Kaldur had gone undercover and left him in charge. Leading the Team had been a full-time job. He’d dropped out of school, moved into Mount Justice, even left most of his civilian clothes behind for Alfred to store somewhere in Wayne Manor. Dick Grayson had all but vanished off the face of the earth for nearly two years. Now, he was trying to write him back into existence.

            He wanted to be a person again. He went out on evenings and weekends to try and keep some order on the streets and scratch the itch of being a hero. He kept a communicator on him, so the Team could call him if they needed him – and they did, sometimes. And sometimes Kaldur called him in on a flimsy excuse for a situation they could have handled without him, and neither of them much cared that Dick could see through the lie. He spent a weekend every month or so in Gotham, usually at Tim’s prodding. But for more than eight hours a day, he was normal. Nightwing was a side task, an extracurricular, not his identity.

             He still retreated to it. One night after Bart-as-new-Kid-Flash made a particularly public spectacle of saving people from a collapsing building, getting himself splashed across national news, he spent hours running across the rooftops, looking for something, anything, cursing the rain and the fact that every bad guy had decided to stay inside tonight. He ran himself to exhaustion, taking a boom tube to Gotham soaked and shivering. Alfred didn’t blink an eye to find Dick in the Manor kitchen at 3AM, slumped over the table and blowing on his hands to bring back feeling. He handed him a mug of tea and admonished him when he tried to take a boom tube back to Bludhaven, shooing him upstairs to his old room instead. Bruce said nothing the next morning, except to ask him to help crack a particularly complex encrypted computer chip he’d recovered.

            It got better. Bit by bit and day by day, what had been unbearable became an ache that settled into his heart, nestled beside his grief for his family, and for Jason. A flash of red hair no longer made him stumble in his tracks. Seeing Bart in Wally’s costume no longer made him struggle for even breaths. Still, like a vintage poster for the Flying Graysons encountered unexpectedly in the back corner of a thrift shop, some things still punched him in the gut.

            He was walking home when he heard and incredulous “ _Dick?_ ” shouted from behind him. His hand jumped reflexively to his cheekbone, patting frantically for a mask before he remembered he wasn’t Nightwing at the moment. It still startled him to be recognized as a civilian unexpectedly. “Dick Grayson, is that really you?” He turned to find a boy he’d known from Gotham Academy staring at him. Terrence, that was his name. Terry. He’d been a computer nerd, Dick recalled. Not quite an asshole, but a bit too smug about his coding skills. He was finally wearing the glasses he’d always insisted he didn’t need, and he’d grown into his height so he no longer looked like a scarecrow.

            “Terry, hi— Wow. What are you doing here?” Terry’s eyes were running up and down, taking him in, and he whistled.

            “Damn, dude, you got _ripped_. I’m visiting my aunt – what are _you_ doing here? I haven’t heard from you in ages. You dropped completely off the map for a while.”

            “I live here. Moved here a few months ago.”

            “Tell me you didn’t give up _Wayne Manor_ for some shitty apartment in Bludhaven.” Dick shrugged. Once he’d gotten over the initial rush as a kid of having a private movie theater in the basement, the Manor more often than not felt too big and empty. Bruce kept it for his parents’ memories and easy concealment for the Batcave, he was pretty sure. There were rooms that no one but Alfred had been into for a decade.

            “It works for me,” he said. “I grew up in a traveling circus, I don’t need anything too fancy.” It was also definitely a step above an abandoned warehouse serving as temporary hero headquarters down on the docks, but he could hardly make that comparison.

            “Whatever,” Terry scoffed. “We should get lunch or something while I’m in town, catch up.”

            “Sure,” Dick said automatically, before he could wonder what he could catch Terry up on in his life.

            “Yeah I actually – it’s a crazy coincidence I ran into you, I was actually trying to look you up on Facebook the other day. I’m applying to this summer program at Central City University, and I thought I remembered you had a friend who was going there, uh, Wally-something? He came by campus sometimes, I think he was dating one of the girls in a grade above us, anyway you introduced me at some point.” Dick tasted ash and swallowed hard, because this wasn’t a discussion he wanted to have at all with Terry Pearson, least of all her and now and unprepared.

            “Wally’s… He died.”

            There were dozens of euphemisms for death. Dick had tried them all, at some point or another. His parents passed away. Tula is no longer with us. Ted Kord bit the dust. Kent Nelson is in a better place. Jason is pushing up daisies. They’d appealed to him in different ways, at different times – a comfort or a reassurance or a crude brutality that gave him a strange sense of control. In the end, though, he spoke in circles and lies and secrets too much already. Perfect blank clarity was better. He didn’t want to put a mask on death.

            Terry was scrambling, Dick could see, flushed with embarrassment of the faux-pas he couldn’t have anticipated. Dick couldn’t have expected him to know. He wished he somehow had, all the same.

            “That’s— Oh God, I’m so sorry, I had no idea— How— What happened?” And this was the part Dick desperately hadn’t wanted to discuss, because he _couldn’t_ answer hm. He couldn’t. For the same reason he couldn’t go to Wallace West’s memorial service. He couldn’t look Terry in the eye and tell him Wally tripped over his own feet and broke his neck falling down the stairs. The words were rotten and heavy and choked him because it was wrong, it was too cruel to have to slander him with “accident” when he ran eyes wide open into self-sacrifice and saved the entire world. It was too cruel that Dick had to tell a barefaced lie while he could still feel the snow shifting beneath his feet, still see the circle of ground blackened by lightning where Wally had simply evaporated, not even leaving them a body to bury. He just shook his head. No number of years living with Bruce, the master of repressed emotions, had given him the ability to swallow down this grief, this injustice to Wally’s memory. He wasn’t sure he regretted that. He had known for years, he didn’t want to be the next Batman. There were some things he still wanted to feel, some things that should be unbearable.

            Terry ended up giving him his phone number, too unbalanced to continue the conversation. Dick walked away and retreated from himself. Nightwing was more vicious than he should have been that night, and Dick didn’t go to bed until after 5AM, madly scrubbing blood off his hands and face and costume, water running red onto his elbows. The local paper published a few opinion pieces on vigilantes over the next few days, as a man dropped on the steps of a hospital by Nightwing struggled through surgery and several blood transfusions. Only when he was finally released – and promptly arrested and charged with selling drugs laced with a Joker venom knockoff – only then did Dick finally return Bruce’s calls. He took the lecture in silence. He never called Terry.

———

            No one had seen Artemis for months, and reports of Tigress were confused and far between. Cheshire had hinted to Roy they were in contact, but no one was eager to intrude on her. Dick kept an eye out for news, but he didn’t try to track her down. It startled him so badly he nearly face-planted into contrete when he found her waiting outside the gym where he worked one afternoon.

            “It’s good to see you but don’t give me a damn heart attack,” he said, one hand on the wall to steady himself. She smiled, eyes tilted towards him.

            “So easy to surprise. You’re slipping. What would Batman say?” she asked.

            “That we shouldn’t be talking like we know him in public with our masks off.” Artemis snorted.

            “I can see the utility belt under your shirt,” she said. “In case the kids attack you? Have to say, this was not where I expected to find you.”

            “Well, my experience in the professional world is somewhat limited. As for the utility belt, old habits die hard.” He picked at his shirt. He would probably still be wearing that utility belt when he was too old and arthritic to even use it.

            “Well, you never really get out,” she said. She pushed off the wall and started walking. Dick fell in beside her.

            “I’m not trying to get out,” he said.

            “Are you sure?” He hesitated.

            “No,” he answered, after almost half a block of silence. “I mean, yes, I’m sure. I took a step back. I don’t want to be all the way out.”

            “I’m whelmed by your certainty,” she said, and he could hear the teasing smile without looking at her.

            “So where have you been?” he asked. “Besides stalking me to work.” It was her turn to fall silent, watching her feet and they moved down the sidewalk.

            “I’ve been… wandering,” she said eventually. “Cheshire… Cheshire told me about some places where I could get away. I came back to see her, sometimes. Visit my niece before she’s all grown up.” She fell silent a moment longer. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch with the rest of you.” Dick shook his head.

            “We’ve all been recovering,” he said. “Everyone understands. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

            “Yeah. ‘Okay.’” They walked without speaking a while, Dick exasperated but unsurprised she seemed to know the way back to his apartment. “I’ve been trying to figure out what he would have wanted me to do,” she said finally. She paused, turning on a side street, sinking onto a public bench. Dick followed suit. “We both wanted out, or… thought we wanted out, at least for a while. I think in reality, both of us missed it more than we wanted to admit. But we had plans, and dreams for the future. Now… going back doesn’t seem right, but I don’t know what my future is without him _or_ the mask. I’m not even sure I know who I _am_ without at least one of those.”

            Dick fidgeted idly with the fingers of one hand, watching as a ray of afternoon sun painted on the side of a building shrunk and vanished behind a passing cloud. “I don’t know how Kaldur manages,” he said. “Maybe because he has no secret identity. All of Atlantis knows who he is, so he can just… be Aqualad and Kaldur all at once. It’s been… confusing, being someone other than Nightwing. The people I work with ask me how I spent my weekend and I don’t have an answer.”

            “Watching crime shows?” Artemis suggested wryly. He chuckled.

            “Does Dick Grayson have hobbies?” he asked, spreading his hands to shrug expressively. “No, I’m asking, I don’t know.” Artemis’s face twisted with a held-back grin.

            “You could tell them you’re a hardcore Batman cosplayer?” she said, and Dick shouted with laughter. They dissolved into snorts and chuckles for a few moments before Artemis leaned back with a sigh. “You know, he told me when you two first met, he thought you were some kid in a Halloween costume. He didn’t believe the rumors that the Boy Wonder was only eleven years old.”

            “And had been doing it for two years longer than him already,” Dick said pompously. She elbowed him in the ribs.

            “Yeah, because Batman letting you fight crime at the age of nine was suuuuuuch a good idea.”

            “Clearly,” he laughed. Artemis rolled her eyes. Dick looked back across the street, the edge of the streak of sunlight reappearing from behind the cloud. “He wouldn’t care, you know. Wally. He wouldn’t care whether you went back or left the life behind. He’d want you to be happy.” He felt her sigh and leaned back beside her.

            “I know,” she said. “But I don’t think I know what would make me happy.” She turned her head to look at him. “Does this make _you_ happy?” she asked. “Being out without your mask, having a normal job, living in a normal apartment with no hidden rooms or boom tubes?” Dick pursed his lips.

            “It wouldn’t,” he said, “if I weren’t still Nightwing too. But I wasn’t happy when I was _only_ Nightwing, either.”

            “ _Are_ you still Nightwing?” she asked. “I mean, I’ve seen the news. You’ve barely been working with the Team at all, and your appearances here have been spotty at best.” Dick flung an arm behind the bench and titled his head back, watching the sky.

            “I’ve been on call,” he said slowly. “I’ve been… auxiliary. But I was… taking time, too.”

            “And now?” He pulled his chin back down and met her gaze.

            “How about you?”

            She crossed her arms. “What about me?”

            “Well, the fact that you’re back in town, but you came to find me, instead of the team, tells me you think you want to come back, but you’re not sure yet.”

            “Alright, Mr. Master Detective,” she scoffed. “ _I_ think you’re dodging my question.”

            “You caught me,” he said. He sighed, letting his head drop back again. “After… I already wanted to back down once Kaldur came back. The Team had been my life for so long, and I was burned out. And then Wally… You two got to be yourselves, for a while, you were building a life for yourselves.” They had been so close – minutes, inches away from the retirement they had wanted. Wally’s death in the mask was the cruelest irony possible. “I realized I hadn’t… had that. I barely knew who I was anymore, if I wasn’t Nightwing, and I didn’t want to die like that.” Artemis reached over and grabbed the hand in his lap and squeezed it.

            “You’re not allowed to die on me too,” she said fiercely. Dick’s lips quirked up in half a smile.

            “I don’t plan to,” he said. “But I couldn’t be on the Team and be Dick at the same time.” Artemis squeezed his hand again before releasing it. She pulled her legs up to her chest, resting her chin in her knees.

            “You know I’m the worst person to give advice,” she said. “But I _know_ the Team misses you, and I know you miss them.” She looked sideways at him and gave him a sly grin. “And I know you miss being Nightwing, with the way you’re watching the sun go down.”

            “What does _that_ mean?” he asked, deliberately pulling his eyes away from the sky.

            “Bats do best in the dark,” she said. She pushed to her feet and stretched out her arms, looking up to the sky herself. “I think I’m coming back,” she said. “Maybe I’ll leave, or retire again in a year, but I think I’m coming back.”

            “It’s good to have you back,” he said. “Stay traught out there.” She turned to look at him, and held out a hand.

            “What about you?” he asked.

            He looked at her hand. Down some timeline, there was Dick Grayson who stayed here, who put on the costume on slow weekends and when he visited Bruce. He’d stay in at night making home-cooked dinners and watching bad TV soap operas. Nightwing would be a pastime, a rarity. Never gone, but infrequent. That Dick Grayson would still one day have a funeral full of people wearing masks of one kind or another. There would still be a memorial full of people who barely even had half the story. He’d sealed that fate the first time he put on Robin’s mask.

            He reached out and grasped her hand and let her pull him to his feet.

            “I’m back.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave comments and kudos if you enjoyed ^^


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